Digital transformation starts with people

If you want better business outcomes, invest in great experiences for
employees and customers

By Chris Bedi

The core elements of digital transformation are speed,
intelligence and superior stakeholder experiences

Emerging
tech enables great employee and customer experiences that drive
desired business outcomes

Successful companies will
disproportionately invest in organizational change to help people
through the transition

A few years ago, “digital transformation” was just another business
buzzword. Today it’s a strategic imperative, as machine learning,
process automation and other emerging technologies change business
from the ground up.

No organization can reap the benefits of next‑generation tech
without putting employees at the center of its strategy. To understand
why, we need to consider the three core elements of digital
transformation.

The first is speed. Machine learning and automation can accelerate
all business functions, from IT and security to finance, HR and
customer service. They also enable business processes that adapt and
improve on their own.

Next is intelligence. Companies have traditionally relied on “rear
view” KPIs that look at past performance to make guesses about the
future. These metrics are rapidly giving way to tools that apply
machine learning to create real‑time insights that accelerate and
improve human decision‑making.

Superior human experiences are the third and most important element.
Digital technologies enable better processes and experiences for
customers and employees. These differentiated experiences are critical
to achieving desired business outcomes. To be successful, digital
transformation initiatives must enable great experiences for employees
and customers.

Each of these elements is disruptive on its own. Collectively they
represent one of the biggest shifts in the history of work. To
capitalize on this shift, businesses need to build a strong internal
foundation. Companies can invest in acquiring the best technology to
jumpstart their digital transformation journey. But those investments
will likely be wasted if employees don’t embrace the change.

Companies need to invest time and resources in several key areas.
The first is equipping employees with the new skills they need to
succeed. Routine tasks that currently suck up as much as 60 percent of
an average employee’s time will disappear gradually, as automation and
AI take over layers of low‑level administrative work.

Long before that happens, however, companies need to identify the
skills and competencies that will make employees successful long‑term.

Business leaders should invest in change management programs that
train employees to be as comfortable working with intelligent machines
as they are with human colleagues. The rise of machine intelligence
doesn’t mean that people and machines will compete for jobs. Instead,
the power of AI—and the potential for better business outcomes—emerges
when people learn to work productively with machines.

Leadership is another key factor. Companies need leaders who
understand how automation can help drive business success. A key
leadership skill will be defining what processes can be delegated to
technology platforms and which ones still require human oversight.

We have a program here called Now on Now where we use our own
technology to automate a variety of routine tasks: IT operations,
legal contract processing, quarterly financial close, and many more.
Alongside these technology programs, we invested in organization
change management programs to help employees understand how their jobs
would shift and make clear that they can now focus on more fulfilling
work instead of routine repetitive tasks.

In addition, we trained our employees on new competencies that build
their careers and equip them to be successful. For example, we
identified four critical training programs that we now require for all
IT employees: communication and influence, design thinking, machine
learning, and automation.

Among the ways we use our own technology is automating the quarterly
financial close, as opposed to forcing accountants to enter massive
amounts of financial data into an ERP system. That shift was
successful because we were able to show our finance employees that
automation doesn’t threaten their jobs. Instead, it eliminates
repetitive busy work and allows them to concentrate on higher‑level
tasks like analyzing key financial metrics that drive our business.

In the IT function, similarly, we’ve automated routine tasks like
provisioning servers, imaging new laptops and eliminating phishing
emails. This increases system uptime, which helps the business. It
also allows our IT team to focus on more strategic work like building
technologies that help our customers.

Employees won’t just go home one night and step into new roles in
the morning. Successful change requires investment in communication
and training, because you need great people and a great culture to
execute any digital business strategy.

You can’t change a culture by writing code. That’s why companies
need to get started on human transformation today.

If you’re interested in learning more about how digital
transformation at ServiceNow starts with people, watch this brief video.

Chris Bedi is ServiceNow’s CIO. He was previously CIO of JDSU,
where he was responsible for IT, Facilities, and Indirect Procurement.
Before that, he held various executive positions at VeriSign, and also
worked at KPMG. He holds a Bachelor’s degree in Computer Engineering
from the University of Michigan.